34 replies to this topic

[pharmer]

My buddy Freddie always based with a solution so that sounds like a good plan to me. 40g/L of will get you a pH 14 NaOH solution, some folks go as high as 60g/L but any more than that is just a waste of lye really.

 

Does this pH apply to a cactus process as well? IIRC pH13  is the target for the mesc

[el_ronhub_bird]

@Phineas_Carmichael that's why I was asking; it would cut my work in half if I can reduce the juice to fit in my sep funnel. When I did my cactus extraction the reduced solution became thick and viscous like syrup like you described

[Phineas_Carmichael]

Does this pH apply to a cactus process as well? IIRC pH13 is the target for the mesc

You bet! Mathematically, if you add 40g of pure NaOH to 1L of distilled water you get a solution of pH 14. The pH of the final solution will depend on how acidic the initial extract is & how much of the basic solution one adds.

[el_ronhub_bird]

40g of lye was slowly added to 200ml of water which was in turn slowly added to the acidic bark solution. I've done 2 pulls over the past 3 days and after evaporation took the pic shown. I've got some crystals and some goo. I'm gonna leave the fan blowing on it for a few days and see if it hardens up at all. In the meantime I'll probably do another pull today. Have a nice day everyone!

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Edited by el_ronhub_bird, 17 October 2022 - 05:51 PM.

[el_ronhub_bird]

I just did 2 more quick pulls, I've been doing them heated by the way. Oh, and with Naptha. They come out cloudy looking like in the pic. Not yellow at all especially compared to a heated pull on MHRB. Should I do a Xylene pull when it's spent like you would with MHRB? Also I've got some bestine if that would come in handy for anything. Lemme know what you guys think. Oh I've gotta question, is there effectively a way to seperate the crystal from the goo? I hear the goo can be just as good as the crystal. I'll probably just use it to make changa due to it's unmanageable nature though

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[Phineas_Carmichael]

Looking good!

Evaporating the naphtha will likely give you mostly goo, which is fine for changa, but if you're after crystalline product you could recrystallize with the bestine(heptane)...

Heat the bestine in a water bath to 70°C(~160°F) in a 250ml erlenmeyer flask or a tall shot glass & dump in all your crude goo & crystals. Stir it all around & hope everything dissolves then take it off the heat & let it cool to room temp.

As things cool there will probably be goo on the bottom & clear solvent on the top. Decent the solvent off the goo & freeze it for crystals.

Save the goo, it will eventually crystallize in a year or two...

Once you're done you should definitely do a couple xylene pulls to get some jungle spice. The resulting goo will probably be really weird...

Edited by Phineas_Carmichael, 18 October 2022 - 11:20 PM.

[el_ronhub_bird]

The story so far: the white-ish crystal chunks (shown in a pic below) were the first 4 pulls all mixed together. I pulled out the 2 big chunks and put them in front of a fan to dry. Sorry I didn't get any pictures of that. Then the remaining goo continued to slowly crystallize over a period of days. Eventually getting to the point where I could scrape it up, which I did. The first 4 pulls yielded 3 grams altogether. On to The 5th and 6th pulls! Lol ok I did 2 more pulls then threw all the previous pulls in with them so I can hopefully turn it all into some nice chunky crystals! Now that we're up to speed @Phineas_Carmichael I accidentally created a similar situation to the one you described in the previous post. Only mine was done with Naptha instead of Bestine: the solvent solution was allowed to cool to room temp and while doing so, an orange-ish oil collected in the bottom of the flask. The solvent was then poured into other containment, the 2 substances were easily seperated, a clean break was achieved by just pouring off the top layer. What I didn't expect was for the orange goo to begin to crystallize overnight. I mean, I knew there were certainly tryptamines in there but damn, not like that. Once the other solution begins to show some serious crystal formation I'll update with pics

Edit: the crystalizing orange goo looks a bit like a contaminated agar plate lol

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Edited by el_ronhub_bird, 27 October 2022 - 12:37 PM.

[Phineas_Carmichael]

Still looking good! The fact that the goo is crystalizing so quickly would suggest to me that it contains a fair amount of n,n-dmt in addition to whatever weird tryptamines make it smell like aquarium tubing and new sneakers to me.

Your pull warm, cool, & decant method looks like it's giving great crystals right off the throw. If those big clusters Andrew Jackson is thinking about dry completely & can be broken up into crystalline product that is a spectacular result from ACRB. Heck, I'd definitely smoke 'em as is! Great job!

My buddy Freddie would re-X all the crystalline stuff in one run with bestine & freeze-pecipitate to get pure white. Then combine all the goo & waste from run 1 and do a 2nd Re-X & freeze to maybe squeeze another couple points of N,N out of it. What goo remains would be put in an evaporation container (a glass petri dish would be excellent, a Pyrex pie plate is good too, even a wide beaker will work) and gently slipped into some pantyhose to keep the dust off. Evap under moving air for a while to see if it solidifies into a wax or needs to be stored as an oil. After that the xylene pulls on the base extract begin & get the same pantyhose protected evap treatment.

That said, Freddie liked to be able to curate the DMT experience by saying things like, "Garçon! I think tonight I'll try 30mg of pure white with a match head sized lump of the orange wax & just a touch of the red mystery oil. No, yes, just mix them together with a small amount of herb and prepare The Device. Thank you, my good friend." Others are not so into the final steps & prefer yellow spice to white, or don't see a difference, or are uncomfortable with purification as a loss vector. These opinions are all equally valid.

What kind of purification (if any) do you have planned? Are you going to turn it all into changa? Whats the next step? Again, I'm just jazzed to be here to watch it live from ACRB. Spectacular work, A+++

Edited by Phineas_Carmichael, 28 October 2022 - 06:36 AM.

[el_ronhub_bird]

@Phineas_Carmichael I prefer the yellow over white crystal when it comes to MHRB extract. That yellow oil, the mystery alkaloid, seems to be entirely absent in this ACRB extract. This makes me want to try the "dirty" product, see if there's any weird alkaloids in there that might change the quality of the trip like the yellow mystery alkaloid in MHRB extract does. As far as purifying the material, I haven't really decided yet. Right now I'm just fuckin around, learning about this new material. I'm very interested in the ways in which it differs from the MHRB extract that I'm used to. It smells different, it looks different. Now I want to see if the trip is different.

Ok, the picture is showcasing how quickly the orange goo is crystallizing. At this pace my guess is that the entire layer will crystallize. And sooner than later

Edit: @Phineas_Carmichael I caught the Andrew Jackson joke, I wished I would have realized that it looks like a cartoon thought bubble, I would have offset it to make it more so like "Andrew Jackson dreaming of DMT!" Lol

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Edited by el_ronhub_bird, 28 October 2022 - 11:11 AM.

[el_ronhub_bird]

Here is what separated from the orange goo after evaporation. I predict that given enough time all of this goo will crystallize too. There are already a bunch of tiny seed crystals dispersed all throughout the goo. I guess we'll see...stay tuned!

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[el_ronhub_bird]

Here is the crystallization so far. It's all gonna completely solidify like I thought it would. It won't take (relatively long) compared to some that have taken years. This process should be done in weeks at tops.

So I'm not certain the 5th and 6th pull added much to the 3 grams from the first 4. I'm just eyeballing though so I could be off. My point is that I don't wanna use anymore naptha on diminishing returns. I suppose I'd be willing to do one more and maybe do a freeze precip to see what if anything is coming out. Then @Phineascarmichael I'll do some xylene pulls just to see what kinda strange jungle substance comes out of it lol. I forgot to answer one of your questions before. I do intend to make some changa from part of this batch, ideally the goo that is difficult to work with. Anyway the yield wasn't amazing from this particular bark. But I also don't discount the fact that I may be more at fault than the bark. This was my first time working with ACRB and in hindsight there are many things I should have done differently. Oh well, yield wasn't my main goal here, that would have just been a bonus. I really just wanted to experience the difference between MHRB and ACRB extract. On the other hand I am glad to still have a stash of MHRB that yields well. Not as great as some I've seen online but pretty good nonetheless

Since this isn't producing a lot, maybe I'll just go ahead and extract the other 500grams I have left instead of stashing it away with my collection of other botanicals. I'd rather save my naptha for that. Then I could tweak some of the minor issues I became aware of doing my first run. Then I'd have a better idea if it was something I had done wrong or if this particular batch of ACRB just isn't that good

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Edited by el_ronhub_bird, 31 October 2022 - 02:42 PM.

[Phineas_Carmichael]

3g of crystalline product from 500g of bark is a 0.6% yield. Without digging too deeply into the literature I found ACRB yields anywhere from 0.4% to 1.0%.

0.6% yellow crystals plus enough goo/wax/wet crystals/oil to experiment with and make "free" changa is a perfectly acceptable yield in my opinion. You've done an excellent job here, especially for a first run on unknown material.

I am of the opinion that the 2% MHRB from days of yore was an anomaly, potentially caused by peculiar growth conditions in certain geographic areas. Soon after it was discovered demand exploded & caused prices to spike, suppliers to change business models, and governments to crack down. This lead to further price hikes as suppliers had to circumvent further import/export controls, etc etc etc.

In short, we were spoiled by a decade or more of 2% MHRB that is getting cost-prohibitive, difficult to source, & legally problematic in certain places. Returning to the other sources of DMT such as ACRB or even Phalaris grass (and accepting lower percent yields) seems to me to be the path forward. Yes, the extraction protocol will need to be revised (there is interesting work being done with things like dry ice and activated carbon) but protocol always needs to be tweaked when something changes in the lab.

This is wonderful, excellent chemistry. I no longer have the responsibility of tagging threads for the archives, but IMO this thread definitely should make the cut.

And now (with apologies) some homework: I am very curious to see what your final results are, as well as what happens with the xylene pulls, but recognize that final evaps will take a while. Take your time but don't forget about us! The results of your 2nd run at the same material would be real interesting too, should you decide to run it instead of storing the other 500g. Again, take your time but don't forget about us! Finally, I would love to read any bioassay reports of the final product(s) you are comfortable writing up over in Storming The Gates. Make sure to shamelessly cross-link them here so that future topiates can find them easily!

Thank you again for your clear reporting, your attention to detail, and for allowing us to come along on this journey. I'm still confident that some day my buddy Freddie will turn up after his ill-fated 2015 voyage to Tristan da Cunha on the sloop, and threads like this will help him get back up to speed real quick...

Edited by Phineas_Carmichael, 02 November 2022 - 01:09 AM.

[el_ronhub_bird]

@PhineasCarmichael I'm not gonna leave you guys hanging, I love posting as much relevant info as possible not only for you guys but for myself as well. I like being able to revisit my threads for quick reference if I forgot a step or need a refresher on a specific measure of some substance or something. I also try to lay it out in such a way that someone can use it as a step by step or tek. The same way I've used other peoples write ups as guidelines for extractions. And Phineas I'm not quite so sure those days of being spoiled are over quite yet. My botanical plug just dropped MHRB prices back down to a much more reasonable price so I'm gonna snag up some of that. Hopefully the quality is consistent with the quality I've received from him in the past, I'd usually yield 1.5-1.75%. It's possible this product could yield 2% but I'm just not willing to do as many pulls as that would require. I usually do 3 and done. Then maybe a xylene pull.

So that's probably my next project; order a new batch of MHRB and see how it yields compared to this pretty high quality bark I already have on hand.

Btw I still haven't tried this ACRB extract but you guys will be the first to know when I do. I'm very interested to see how it compares to MHRB extract.

Now about the ACRB extract: it has largely solidified, hardened and/or crystallized. It took a couple weeks but it's good to know it will eventually morph into a more manageable form. I might mix it all back together, even if it separates into layers as it crystalizes, it'd still be kinda cool to have it all congeal into one chunk, with different parts of the chunk having slightly different alkaloid profiles

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[el_ronhub_bird]

Total yield so far is 3.7 grams (don't feel like busting out the milligram scale.) I might do one more Naptha pull on the bark solution and of course finish up with a xylene pull to see what kinda weirdness comes out then I think I'm done with this particular extraction

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Edited by el_ronhub_bird, 26 November 2022 - 09:37 AM.

[el_ronhub_bird]

Here's a better look at the 3.7 grams of DMT from the previous picture. I need a better camera because I can never capture the true color of things like weed and this particular batch of DMT. It's not as orange as it appears in the picture, it's actually much lighter in color. Anyway this is a totally different hugh than any MHRB extract I've made so I hope that's an indication of a different alkaloid profile and (fingers crossed) a noticeable difference in effects

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